The Influence of Taylor on the East German Communists, 1945-51
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DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS ISSN 1441-5429 DISCUSSION PAPER 22/11 Tayloristic rather than Taylorists: The Influence of Taylor on the East German Communists, 1945-51 Wayne Geerling* and Gary B. Magee# Abstract Perhaps the most unexpected of Frederick Taylor‟s legacies is the alleged influence his ideas had in the Soviet world. This paper explores this contention by examining the introduction of differential piece rates and „scientific‟ norms—both key aspects of the Taylorist and Soviet systems—in East Germany between 1945 and 1951. As elsewhere, these measures faced stiff opposition. What made this experience different was that their introduction took place in the context of extreme economic and political uncertainty. As this paper outlines, the party‟s various attempts to impose workplace control laid the foundations for the Sovietisation of East Germany. This paper uses a variety of primary sources to tell this story. It concentrates its attention not just on worker resistance to change, but also on how the interactions between party and worker, between different organisations within the occupation zone, between the Soviets and German communists, and within the party itself came together to see piecework entrenched within the East German workplace. While Taylor‟s ideas influenced the party in this process, they did so only after they had been fed through the prisms of Leninism, Stalinism and Soviet experience. East Germany‟s communists were Tayloristic, not Taylorist. JEL Codes: J31, J53, N34, N44, P51 Keywords: Taylorism, East Germany, norms, differential piece rate, workplace relations * School of Economics and Finance, La Trobe University, Victoria, 3086, AUSTRALIA. Tel: +61 39479 1148, Fax: +61 39479 1654. Email: [email protected] # Associate Dean (Graduate), Professor of Economics, Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University, Victoria, 3145, AUSTRALIA. Tel: +61 3 9903 1307, Fax: +61 3 9903 1412. Email: [email protected] This paper was written for the “Legacy of FW Taylor: 100 Years of Scientific Management” conference held in Prato, Italy on 20-21 October 2011. © 2011 Wayne Geerling and Gary B. Magee All rights reserved. No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author. 1 In the hundred years since its publication, Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s Principles of Scientific Management has had a profound impact on how we understand work and the management of the shopfloor. Perhaps the most surprising of its legacies, though, is the influence it has had on those who Taylor himself would have least expected to have embraced his ideas, namely, the stridently anti-capitalist communist parties of central and Eastern Europe.1 What excited them about Taylorism was its perceived scientific basis, modernity, and emphasis on practical outcomes. Combined with its strict top-down management style—in many ways not dissimilar to the Soviet‘s own notion of one-man- rule—and promise to resolve shopfloor tensions and unleash productivity growth, these attributes of Taylorism ensured that it would be actively explored by the Soviet state right from its inception.2 Thus, finding means to implement effective differential piece rates, determine norms scientifically, and organise workflows more rationally became tasks that were to preoccupy the communist world for the next seven decades. If, in the first half of the twentieth century, Taylorism was the wave of the future, then communists were desperate to be perceived to be riding on its crest. And the authority to do so came from the very top. As Lenin wrote, not long after taking power, ―the Taylor system represents the tremendous progress of science, which systematically analyses the process of production and points the way towards an immense increase in the efficiency of human labour‖.3 He urged that ―every 1 Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 2004); Kendall E. Bailes, ―Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918-1924‖, Soviet Studies, 29:3 (1977), pp. 373-94; D. Gvishiani, Organization and Management: A Sociological Analysis of Western Theories (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972; J. A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 2 Frederick W. Taylor, Scientific Management (Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 82-83 and 10-12. See also: Frederick W. Taylor, ―A piece-rate system, being a step towards a partial solution of the labor problem‖. Paper read before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Republished in Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Volume 16 (1895), pp, 856-887. 3 V.I. Lenin, ―The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Government‖. Republished in: V.I Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 42, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), pp. 79-80. 2 use should be made of the scientific methods of work suggested by this system. Without it, productivity cannot be raised, without it, we shall not be able to introduce socialism‖.4 Despite these auspicious beginnings, the contribution of Taylorism to the Soviet world turned out to be far from clear cut. Indeed, many have argued that it failed to take root at all or, if it did, was quickly corrupted. Numerous reasons have been put forward for its inability to gel: the rise of the human relations approach to labour sciences,5 the ardent opposition of the left communists,6 the emergence of mass activist movements that placed the heroics of workers before rational organisation of the shopfloor,7 the political opportunism and insincerity of the communist leadership,8 and the fundamental realities of the Soviet economic system9 and its political economy,10 which literally made the introduction of scientific management impossible. Of course, in May 1945, when Berlin fell to the Red Army, these and many of the Soviet system‘s other inherent weaknesses were either not known or had not yet been fully grasped. In fact, at the time, communism had never appeared stronger. As a victorious occupying power, the Soviet Union now assumed control over large swaths of Eastern Germany and assumed responsibility for the region‘s economic management. At first, this duty amounted to little more than ensuring that the local population was fed, but once it became apparent that 4 V.I. Lenin, ―Speech at a Meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council, 1 April 1918‖. Republished in: in V.I Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 42 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), pp. 86-7. 5 Stefan Link, ―From Taylorism to Human Relations: American, German, and Soviet trajectories in the interwar years―. Paper presented to the Business History Conference, March 2011, pp. 1-16. 6 Zenovia A. Sochor, ―Soviet Taylorism Revisted‖, Soviet Studies 33: 2 (April 1981), pp. 246-64; Daniel A. Wren and Arthur G. Bedeian, ―The Taylorization of Lenin: rhetoric or reality?‖, International Journal of Social Economics 31:3 (2004), p. 291. 7 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ―Soviet Norm Determination in Theory and Practice, 1917-1941‖ Soviet Studies 36: 1 (January 1984), pp. 57-63; Arthur G. Bedeian and Carl R. Phillips, ―Scientific Management and Stakhanovism in the Soviet Union: A Historical Perspective‖, International Journal of Social Economics 17:10 (1990), pp. 31- 34. 8 Wren and Bedeian, ―The Taylorization of Lenin: rhetoric or reality?‖, pp. 296-97. 9 Don Van Atta, ―Why is there no Taylorism in the Soviet Union?‖, Comparative Politics 18:3 (April 1986), pp. 334-35. 10 Jeffrey Kopstein, The politics of economic decline in East Germany, 1945-1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 11-12; 31. 3 its presence there was not going to be short-lived, attention shifted to longer term plans, including the rational re-organisation of workplaces. The East Germans communists, who were to lead this process, of course, did not work with a blank canvas. In addition to having Soviet expertise on piece rate and norm determination on tap,11 they had significant home-grown experience to draw upon. As in many European countries, scientific management became popular in business circles in Germany in the 1920s. This interest soon became institutionalised. In 1921, the Association of German Engineers (AGE) established a Committee for Economic Production (CEP), from which a subcommittee with a distinctly Taylorist bent was formed. This subcommittee devoted its attentions to investigating ways to save work time, reduce the tiredness of workers, detect mistakes, and calculate and calibrate all dimensions of work. When, however, the CEP broke from the AGE in 1923 to merge with the National Board of Trustees for Economic Efficiency in Industry and Trade, this subcommittee did not follow its parent committee, but instead reconstituted itself on 30 September 1924 as the National Committee for Determining Work Times, or Reichsausschuss für Arbeitszeitermittlung (REFA).12 REFA quickly established itself as the most important and enduring of the Taylorist organisations in Germany, acting as consultants to a wide range of German businesses during the Weimar Republic. During the Nazi period, the organisation was integrated into the German Labour Front, where, together with the more human relations-orientated German Institute of Labour Science and German Institute for Technical Labour Training, it continued to undertake time and motion studies and provided advice on the rationalisation of German workplaces, now, though, in a manner consistent 11 Siegelbaum, ―Soviet Norm Determination in Theory and Practice, 1917-1941‖, pp. 45-68. 12 Manfred Schulte-Zurhausen, Organisation. 5., überarb. und aktualisierte Aufl. (München: Vahlen, 2010), p. 11; REFA Verband für Arbeitsstudien und Betriebsorganisation e. V.(Hrsg.) Methodenlehre des Arbeitsstudiums : Teil 1 Grundlagen. 7. Auflage, (München: Hanser, 1984), p. 29. 4 with the Nazi‘s vision of a Volksgemeinshaft, or people‘s community.13 This engagement and association with National Socialism, however, would prove problematic for REFA—and Taylorism more generally—in post-war East Germany.